Diane Clear, Brooklyn native and Davenport College alumni, joins Knewton as CEO Jose Ferreira’s executive assistant. Diane is a proud NY Foodie. Her favorite movies are sci-fi and horror, and she loves well-written classic sitcoms. Diane’s favorite time of day is sunset in the summertime.

Originally from Philadelphia, Data Analyst Robert Grande joins Knewton after a stint volunteering in Nepal. He enjoys playing the guitar, biking, cooking, traveling, and jiu jitsu. Robert’s favorite TV show is Game of Thrones.

Digital Curriculum Developer Sara Dalziel was born in India and raised in Europe. After getting her degree from Tufts University, Sara spent time as a teacher, and also worked for the education companies Flat World Knowledge and Amplify. Sara loves to bike, cook, and do yoga.

Brooklyn local Dave Kirkpatrick is the newest manager on the software engineering team at Knewton. David attended William & Mary College as well as Columbia College. Before becoming a Knerd, David spent time working at the financial platform OnDeck. He enjoys gardening, camping, and reading. His favorite movie is Waking Life.

Benamy Yashar joins Knewton as a data analyst. He attended Stanford University. Before coming to Knewton, he taught math and physics in Mexico and designed algorithms to analyze old paper seismograms. Benamy loves dancing, backpacking, and playing Ultimate frisbee. He would have liked to witness the first discovery of chocolate, and hates when people cherry-pick from snack mixes.

Born in the western islands of Japan and raised in Hiroshima, Keiichi Minato is Knewton’s newest implementation architect. Keiichi studied at Hiroshima University where he graduated with a social studies degree. In his free time, Keiichi enjoys baseball and football and playing the bass guitar. Keiichi says American and British 80s rock music has been his most effective English teacher.

Akira Tanaka, born in Kanagawa, Japan, joins Knewton as the Director of Business Development in APAC. After graduating from New York University, Akira worked in many fields including education, engineering, and technology. He loves listening to Beethoven, Mahler, Chopin, and Samuel Barber.

Winston Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

Until recently, the same could be said for the factory model of education. Imported from Europe and implemented at the urging of education reformer Horace Mann, the factory model puts kids into age-based classrooms and uses seat time to determine when they’re ready to move on to the next level.

In many ways, it’s an awful system, rigid, arbitrary, and impersonal. But it’s also responsible for almost every modern innovation we rely on today. The factory model reduced the per student cost of education sufficiently that wealthy countries could, for the first time ever, provide free and compulsory K-12 education to all children. Wherever the model doesn’t exist, the populace desperately wants it. Modern medicine, housing, entertainment, transportation, communication, the internet — all of it, and everything else in the modern world, are due to the factory model. That’s the good part.

Now for the bad.

The factory model requires of children that they independently decipher the world’s largest bureaucracy — replete with invisible rules, conflicting stakeholders, perverse incentives, and assembly-line product delivery. They receive no user’s guide to navigate this gargantuan meat grinder.

Inevitably, some kids are a better fit for the system than others, because of personality, upbringing, temperament, or other factors. Perhaps they thrive in highly structured environments. Perhaps the pace is just right for them. But if you are one of those people who thinks a little differently, if you don’t quite conform, if you can’t easily control your attention span, if you perceive the structure of the world in your own way and at your own pace — well, then you may be a genius, or you may just be your own dynamic personality, but you are a poor fit for the factory model. All these students have to work harder to achieve the same results as equally talented students who happen to fit the system better. Or, they may not be able to achieve the same results at all, regardless of effort. Their brains just don’t work that way.

In recent decades, society has begun to notice and grapple with a small number of the most obvious of the above cognitive differences — for example, the ill-named “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” Every child is unique. It should hardly be surprising that each child’s attention span is too.

Education thought-leader Ken Robinson argues that ADHD is a “fictitious epidemic,” citing the much higher prevalence of diagnoses on the East Coast vs. the West Coast. It’s a wonderful talk, but on this small point I disagree. The medical community’s reaction to ADHD is in many ways a crude reflection of the problems of the factory system. Their reactions are inconsistent across the country simply because doctors on the East Coast happen to be further ahead in their acceptance of ADHD and its permutations. That said, the treatment for ADHD shouldn’t automatically be Ritalin and Adderall. What students really need is the license, and opportunity, to learn in their own unique way.

Our education system ought to adapt to students. Instead, we force students to adapt to the system — without giving them any guidance. When they don’t, we constantly tell them, explicitly and implicitly through lower grades and lower expectations, that they aren’t smart enough or hardworking enough. And we end up basically giving up on them in different ways, at different times, and in vast quantities.

Take math, for instance. Every human being can learn math. All of us master much harder material simply by growing up and learning how to live in our dizzyingly complex society. Math is child’s play compared to that. Yet how many students give up on math, or other subjects, and are encouraged by the system to do so? Let’s stop holding our kids responsible for these “failures,” and instead hold the factory system responsible. This isn’t a minority of children we’re talking about. The factory model wasn’t designed to be the best fit for the greatest number of students. It was just optimized for low cost.

What damage are we doing to these children? What effect does this system have on their self-image? On their expectations of what’s possible for themselves? On the depth of their learning and development? Society ignores this cost, because it is largely invisible, and human beings irrationally ignore invisible costs. But the cost of this psychic damage, and the opportunity cost of this underutilization of talent, must be stratospheric.

We’ve all grown up with the factory model of education. It’s come to seem totally normal. It’s not normal at all. It’s just the only way we’ve been able to deliver free widespread K-12 education up until now.

The Teacher’s Burden

Tacitly, we ask teachers to compensate for our education system’s many inadequacies. Do your students need more, or different, content? Make it yourself! What’s that? You were trained as an instructor, not a content creator? Stop complaining. You can find it somewhere! You have students with learning disabilities? Figure out how to reach them! Your students are bored with the state-mandated curriculum? Be more dynamic! Entertain them! You want to help students who are falling behind, or who find the material too easy? Figure out how to personalize it!

Because teachers are the most visible emissaries of the factory model, we irrationally conflate them with its failures. Teachers aren’t “the system.” Teachers are fighting the system, every day, as best they can. What warmth and energy students see in the classroom comes from teachers. What supplemental content, what motivation and inspiration, what differentiation — it comes from teachers. Let’s stop blaming them for the system’s shortfalls, and let’s start helping them overcome them.

Changing the System

I can think of lots of ways to help teachers. They’re undercompensated; let’s pay them more. I know that’s expensive, but it will ultimately more than pay for itself through higher GDP. Studies have found a correlation between higher teacher pay and improved student outcomes. Boosting compensation would attract more people to the field and increase retention.

Let’s also provide teachers with more training and more time for preparation, mentoring, and professional development. Teachers in the U.S. spend about as much time working as instructors in countries like Japan and South Korea. But in the U.S., 53% of that time is spent in the classroom, vs. 26% for instructors in Japan.

Let’s provide more career advancement opportunities to prevent our best teachers from leaving education. A 2012 study from The New Teacher Project found that 20% of teachers “who are so successful that they are nearly impossible to replace” leave their school as a result of “neglect and inattention.” A 2012 MetLife survey reports that the percentage of teachers who report being very satisfied with their jobs dropped 15 points since 2009, from 59% to 44%, “the lowest level in over 20 years. The percentage of teachers who say they are very or fairly likely to leave the profession has increased by 12 points since 2009, from 17% to 29%.” Not every teacher wants to become an administrator. But many teachers do want a chance to advance within the profession.

Let’s set reasonable expectations, and recognize that teachers can’t fix in a semester societal inequities that have been festering for generations. Let’s substantially reduce the emphasis on high-stakes testing — it’s turning schools into test prep drilling centers.

Personalizing the Factory

Students all have different needs, tendencies, and interests. Let’s give teachers the tools they need to differentiate instruction effectively. By replacing traditional textbooks with data-driven personalized learning materials, we can help every student come to class better prepared and give teachers more information about how their students learn than ever before.

The U.S. has three very large K-12 textbook publishers: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), Pearson, and McGraw Hill. Meanwhile, walk into your local CVS and you’ll find 30 different types of toothpaste, all with pretty much the same active ingredients. As a society, we’ve somehow agreed it makes sense to have ten times the product differentiation for toothpaste than for learning materials used by 55 million students across the country.

I’m happy to say that this is beginning to change. K-12 publishers like HMH are implementing data-driven adaptive learning technology into their digital materials — making it possible for students to use the same content library but encounter content and activities algorithmically selected for them based on their needs. HMH’s Personal Math Trainer Powered by Knewton, for example, is a Pre-K to 12th-grade tool that uses Knewton to create a progressive, personalized learning experience. PMT also helps teachers target intervention and emphasize depth of understanding and problem-solving skills.

Teachers also rely on supplementary materials — many of them OER resources found on the web — to provide students with alternate approaches or explanations of course material. Busy teachers spend hours searching for these materials and then figuring out which videos, explanations, or exercises will best meet individual students’ needs. Knewton’s new direct-to-consumer tool (currently in private beta) will make it easy to discover supplemental content that’s proven most effective for students like yours, and build adaptive learning lessons in just a few minutes’ time. Knewton features curated OER content created by educators, along with the ability to add your own content and have it become adaptive. With a click of a button, teachers can specify exactly what concepts they want students to learn, by when. Knewton provides students with exactly the materials they need at that moment in time. Knewton also enables adaptive assessments within lessons, meaning teachers can get more accurate data about student learning with fewer exams and high-stakes tests.

Children are innately curious about the world around them. They are learning machines. All they really do, all day long, is learn. It isn’t learning itself they resist; it’s the factory model. It has indeed been the worst system, except for every other. We can now do better.

Ben Plaut: Ben, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science major and Pittsburgh native, joins the adaptive learning team. He loves eating sushi and his favorite book is Harry Potter. If deserted on an island, Ben would bring a bunch of rocks.

Daniel Chen joins the consumer team this summer at Knewton. He is originally from Taiwan and currently studies computer science at New York University. Daniel describes himself as empathetic, tolerant, and aspiring. His favorite place to travel is Japan. His favorite movie, “The Wind Rises,” is also Japanese.

Cornell University chemical engineering major and Seal Beach, California local Justin Khalil joins the learning team this summer. Justin loves eating good ramen and listening to T-Pain’s NPR Music Tiny Desk concert. If Justin were abandoned on an island he would bring SmartWater — not for the electrolytes, just because he likes the taste.

Chloe Calvarin is part of the adaptive learning team at Knewton. She currently studies computer science at Harvey Mudd College. Born in France and raised in New Jersey, Chloe is a sailor and cook (she loves chocolate and ratatouille). If she were stranded on a deserted island she would bring a pocket knife for survival.

Sid Reddy, a Brownsville, Texas native and Cornell University computer science major, joins the research team this summer. Sid’s favorite food is smoked salmon, and his favorite movie is Interstellar. His favorite place to travel is Europe. If marooned on an island, he would bring a satellite phone.

Hailing from the old steel town of Youngstown, Ohio, Jessie Dann (that’s me!) joins the marketing team this summer. She is an English major at Arizona State University and loves eating steak and reading “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran. Her favorite place to travel is in her imagination. If abandoned on an island she would be sure to have her dog, Token, with her.

Welcome to Alan Jaffe, a Carnegie Mellon computer science major from Solon, Ohio. This summer, the “always curious” Alan joins the test engineering team at Knewton. He loves the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and eating pasta. When asked what he would bring along if stranded on an island, Alan said he would choose a boat.

Devon Pinkus, originally from Bensalem, PA, joins the adaptive learning team at Knewton. Devon graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he studied psychology and business. He loves to travel anywhere there is adventure and pasta involved. His favorite book is East of Eden by John Steinbeck and he describes himself as mindful, creative, and compassionate.

Hailing from Singapore, Boijian Han is currently a computer science student at Carnegie Mellon University. He joins the adaptive QA team at Knewton. Bojian loves anything cherry-flavored and loves to travel along rivers. If he were stranded on a deserted island, he would bring his notebook for safety.

]]>http://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/introducing-the-interns-3/feed/0Chipping Away at the Digital Dividehttp://www.knewton.com/blog/ceo-jose-ferreira/chipping-away-at-the-digital-divide/
http://www.knewton.com/blog/ceo-jose-ferreira/chipping-away-at-the-digital-divide/#commentsWed, 03 Jun 2015 21:22:46 +0000http://www.knewton.com/?p=66870Read more]]>It’s been almost 20 years since the New York Times helped coin the phrase “digital divide” with a true tale of two elementary schools in San Jose located within a stone’s throw of Apple’s headquarters.

The Harker School, an elite private academy, had state-of-the-art Power Macs and access to what was then known as the World Wide Web. Just a mile down the road, Anderson Elementary, one of California’s poorest schools, had outdated PCs that were barely a step up from typewriters.

When that article was written in 1996, only nine percent of US classrooms were wired to the internet. Since then, the United States has spent billions wiring schools — yet the digital divide persists.

It has been reported that roughly two-thirds of the global population still lacks Internet access. In 2013, fewer than 20 percent of public schools reported that their internet connection met their needs. This January, more than 500 schools in New York State alone reported that they had no internet access at all.

Poor schools are still hit hardest. Teachers of the lowest income students are more than twice as likely as teachers of the highest income students to say that students’ lack of access to digital technologies is a “major challenge,” according to The Atlantic. These students also lack access at home. Just 45 percent of households with an income of less than $20,000 a year have broadband access, compared to 91 percent of those earning $75,000 or more.

The persistence of the digital divide is tragic but not surprising. If it were easy to solve poverty, we’d have done it years ago. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: the best way to fight societal inequality is by increasing access to great education. But societal inequality is the single greatest obstacle to increasing access to great education.

How can we create a virtuous circle out of this vicious cycle?

Recent problems in places like Los Angeles have shown that iPads alone aren’t the answer. It’s not worth spending millions on devices without good implementation and high-quality content.

We also can’t wait for 100 percent broadband access to begin improving education for students. That’s still years away. Stopgap solutions can help improve learning for today’s students, while we work to improve long-term access to broadband, devices, and professional development.

For example, the White House’s ConnectED initiative is set on delivering quality broadband to 99% of American students by 2018. This is great — but it won’t improve access for all students right now. An underserved school district in California came up with a clever temporary fix: park WiFi-enabled buses outside trailer parks where their students live.

We can develop solutions that bring the best of what digital can do to bricks and mortar classrooms and printed materials. Much of the promise of digital learning materials lies in their ability to adapt in real-time to address each student’s needs, as well as help teachers see in what exact areas students need support. Up to now, only those schools with broadband and devices have been able to provide students with the benefits of this technology.

That’s why Knewton is developing technology with HP that will allow students without 1:1 digital devices or broadband to access “personalized print” materials. Students and teachers still using print materials will just need one smartphone to generate personalized worksheets for each student.

WiFi buses and personalized print materials won’t solve everything. But they will expand access to broadband and personalized learning materials to a large number of students who otherwise wouldn’t have them. And together with other innovations, they can start breaking down the digital divide and pave the way for bigger, more permanent change.

Originally from Israel, Zohar Yardeni joins Knewton as chief product officer. Previously, Zohar ran the product team at ZocDoc. Zohar received an MBA from Columbia Business School and a B.A. from Cornell University. His favorite movie is the Big Lebowski and he loves snowboarding. If he could witness any event past, present, or future, it would be the creation of the universe.

Dylan Kolleeny joins the learning team. She is a New York City native and attended the University of Vermont, before becoming a middle school and high school science teacher. Her hobbies include cooking and hiking. Her favorite TV show is Breaking Bad and her biggest pet peeve is pole-huggers on the subway.

Pamela Hersperger, from Vermont and also a UVM grad, is the senior manager for the learning team. She previously managed the content team and content strategy at Flat World Knowledge. Her biggest pet peeve is drivers who don’t stop at crosswalks. Her hobbies include running and skiing, and her favorite fast food chain is Shake Shack.

Mendy Berkowitz, originally from New York, is new to the SRE team. Before Knewton, he attended Yeshiva University and worked as a systems administrator at Fog Creek Software. His biggest interest is whiskey, his favorite book is Catch 22, and his favorite time of the year is the NHL playoffs.

How do you explain Hack Day to to your parents? I start with the logistics. Hack Day is a two day event at Knewton where we all set aside our normal obligations and our normal teams. We can work on any project we want, ideally with a group of people we don’t ordinarily work with.

Knewton sponsors Hack Days three times per year. Each lasts two days, typically a Thursday and Friday. Everyone participates — this isn’t just for technologists.

This most recent Hack Day’s theme was “Productivity & Tooling.”

Time is your most expensive resource. Discover ways to get more meaningful work done throughout the day: automate mundane tasks, improve communication, reduce inefficient meetings… . The bigger the impact, the better the chance of winning!

Teams were encouraged to work on a project related to this theme, but it wasn’t required. In addition to this special category, there were four areas in which hacks could win (yes, there are winners, but no losers!):

Teams can form organically, or people can post their ideas and recruit members via our Hack Day Trello board.

The festivities kick off on Thursday morning with breakfast and an inspiring speech. Teams work together all day Thursday and Friday. By Monday morning, each team posts their finished hack to the Trello board with a link to the product, presentation, demo video, or anything else that can demonstrate their work.

Knerds have a day to vote on these hacks, then the winners are announced!

The following week the winners present their hacks to the entire company. Some of these hacks will earn sponsorship from Knewton’s senior management team and be folded into the company roadmap. In many cases, even hacks that don’t win or get sponsorship will still become a part of Knewton’s products, processes, or cultural life.

So now that you know a little bit about how Hack Day works, let’s get to this Hack Day’s winners! The winning projects for Knewton Hack Day April 2015 are…

Productivity & Tooling

StudentViz: Interactive Tools for Visualizing Student Progress

Team: Hillary Green-Lerman, Erin Case, Erin Moore, and Chris Cotter

StudentViz creates interactive visualizations based on how students are currently using Knewton-powered products. The Knewton team can then use these anonymized visualizations to improve features of Knewton Recommendations and Analytics for students. StudentViz can also be used to demonstrate how differentiated instruction works for partners interested in integrating Knewton technology into their products.

There’s a great outdoor space on our recently acquired 20th floor, and the remains of a garden from the previous tenant. This team took the opportunity to clean up what was there and plant some new things. Even Gloria the chocolate lab got in on the hack.

Performance

Fix All the Infrastructure

Team: Benjamin Pollack, John Davies, Rafi Shamim, Raghav Sachdev

When you’re busy with the day to day efforts of improving education, sometimes the smaller things — like infrastructure — fall a bit behind. This team’s goal was to upgrade or replace all of our outdated infrastructure. They successfully upgraded our Nexus and Gerrit and installed Phabricator.

Product

Knerds: the iOS Game

Team: Charlie Harrington, Dan McGorry

With the help of designer Dan McGorry, London-based BD Director Charlie Harrington built his very first app! ‘Knerds’ is a simple and fun iOS game that teaches you the names of your co-workers through brute force, cuddly mascots, and spaced repetition (because it’s addictive). Here’s a blog post from Charlie describing the game.

The Knewbie Guide is an new and improved onboarding guide for new employees. In addition to standard details about the office and Knewton benefits, the guide includes info about Knerd sports teams, social groups, and activities — all in one place.

]]>http://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/knewton-hack-day-spring-2015/feed/0Introducing Knewton Content Insights for Publishershttp://www.knewton.com/blog/adaptive-learning/introducing-knewton-content-insights-for-publishers/
http://www.knewton.com/blog/adaptive-learning/introducing-knewton-content-insights-for-publishers/#commentsTue, 28 Apr 2015 19:34:33 +0000http://www.knewton.com/?p=66770Read more]]>At Knewton, we work very closely with publishers’ editorial teams in the course of integrating their products with our technology.

One thing we’ve heard repeatedly in our conversations with publishers is a desire for a more quantitative means of evaluating how well their particular textbook content is performing for students. Publishers can and do solicit qualitative feedback from students and teachers, but this takes a lot of time and can be difficult to gather at scale. While they can also track observed metrics like student logins or usage times, this surface-level information only goes so far.

We’ve found that publishers really want to understand how well content actually contributes to student learning and helps improve achievement. They want to use this information to build better products, and improve existing ones. Knewton has built the world’s first and only web-based engine to automatically extract statistics comparing the relative quality of content items — enabling us to infer more information about student proficiency and content performance than ever before possible.

With Knewton Content Insights, this information is now available at a glance for publishers and other content creators.

Content Insights: Sample Metrics

Content Insights help publishers improve their content’s quality, quantity, and organization; make informed investments in their development cycle; and better support students using learning products. Here are a few examples of the information a Knewton Content Insights dashboard provides.

Assessment Quality

How well do individual questions assess a student’s understanding of a topic?

Questions with high assessment quality do a good job predicting students’ answers on other related questions. For these questions, knowing whether a student got the question right reveals a lot about how well she understands the given concept overall.

This information helps publishers figure out which questions to keep, and which to revise or replace — and ultimately improve learning experiences for students.

Exhaustion

Where do students run out of content?

Exhaustion looks at how much content students are using in a particular area. For example, if students tend to use all the material in a chapter on cell division, publishers can focus on creating additional questions or instructional content for this topic. This helps publishers use their content development resources more efficiently and make sure students have the materials they need to succeed.

Difficulty

What is the relative difficulty of a given question?

Content creators can see how hard each question is for students, relative to other questions intended to test similar material. Difficulty is calculated by analyzing how often a question is answered incorrectly and how many tries it takes each student to answer correctly, along with other factors. The difficulty metric helps content creators better target their content’s level to students’ needs.

Publishers can also look at difficulty as it relates to exhaustion. If they see that students are using all the content in a certain area, and the topic is particularly hard, they will probably want to prioritize adding more material in that area.

Building Better Products

With digital learning comes a huge improvement in product transparency. Digital learning empowers students, teachers, and schools to see exactly how much a given product impacts learning outcomes. Content Insights provide publishers with actionable data to build more effective products, and enable them to get ahead in the market by basing their sales efforts on proven outcomes.

Knewton Content Insights are currently live with several beta partners. Soon, they will be available to all publishers in the course of a normal Knewton integration. Feedback from current and prospective customers has been overwhelmingly positive.

Partners are using different metrics depending on their needs. One beta partner building K-12 products is particularly focused on content exhaustion — they’re using the metric to drive their content creation efforts, prioritizing topic areas where students tend to run out of content most quickly.

A partner in the ELT space is particularly excited about seeing data about the relative difficulty of their assessment items and groups of items — e.g., do students generally find the present simple tense easier to understand than the present perfect tense? They plan to use Content Insights to rewrite items that prove much harder or easier than other items that assess the same concepts, to provide a more consistent experience for all students.

We’re excited to see how future partners apply Content Insights to improve their editorial processes. Knewton will continue to expand the education insights we offer to partners. Ultimately, our goal is to help the world build better products that drive bigger learning gains for students.

Interested in using Content Insights for your digital product? If you’re a current Knewton partner, talk to your partnership manager. Otherwise, get in touch here.

Nat Medija (center), originally from the Philippines, is new to the systems engineering team. He went to the University of San Carlos and previously worked for Good Technology and PayPal. His favorite TV show is Breaking Bad and his favorite time of year is autumn. If he could witness one event in the future, it would be the end of world hunger.

Patricia Trujillo (left) joins the human resources team. Born in Mexico, she moved to New York when she was eight years old, attended NYU, and previously worked for Fidessa, a tech company in the finance world. She enjoys soccer, volleyball, dancing, and drawing, and her favorite time of day is bedtime.

Khanh Lam (right), a UX designer, was born in Vietnam. She attended Rutgers University, and previously worked as a product designer at a trading platform. A Room with a View is both her favorite book and her favorite movie. Her biggest pet peeve is having her computer monitor touched.

Michael Nobil (individual picture) is a product manager for Knewton’s direct-to-consumer product. Originally from Boston, he graduated from UMass Amherst and previously worked in product management at Outbrain.

]]>http://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/introducing-four-new-knerds-2/feed/0Introducing Six New Knerdshttp://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/introducing-six-new-knerds-2/
http://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/introducing-six-new-knerds-2/#commentsMon, 06 Apr 2015 14:00:26 +0000http://www.knewton.com/?p=66307Read more]]>Welcome to six new Knerds!

Chukwudi Onike (Chuk) is an office services coordinator for the facilities team. He is originally from Nigeria and got his degree from the City College of New York. His favorite movies are all of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and he enjoys playing soccer and basketball. If he could witness one event past, present, or future, it would be the Oprah Show Free Car Giveaway.

Originally from Lima, Peru, Al Herrera is the manager of facilities and office services. He attended SUNY Morrisville. He enjoys going bowling, watching movies, and attending live sporting events. His favorite time of day is the morning. If he could witness one event in the past, it’d be the creation of Machu Picchu.

Becky Remsha, of Wisconsin, is new to the finance and accounting team. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin and previously worked in finance for HBO. Her biggest pet peeve is slow walkers and her favorite movie is Almost Famous. In the future, she would like to experience recreational space travel.

Patrick

PatrickO’Leary joins Knewton as a director of software engineering. He is originally from Ireland, where he attended UDC Ireland. Before Knewton, he worked as a VP of technology for ePals/CricketMedia. He enjoys cooking and fishing, his biggest pet peeve is unnecessary complexity, and his favorite book is The Field.

Originally from Austin, Amadeus Junquiera is a senior software engineer. He attended Emerson College and previously worked at Mic Media. His hobbies include music production and generative animation. His favorite book is White Girls by Hilton Als and his favorite time of year is fall in New York City.

Allin Resposois a software engineer for the retail team. Originally from Miami, he went to MIT to study mechanical engineering and has worked as a web developer at a creative agency. If he could witness one event past, present, or future, it would be dinosaurs (“from a safe distance, of course!”). His favorite fast food chain is Taco Bell and his favorite time of day is party time.

]]>http://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/introducing-six-new-knerds-2/feed/0Introducing Personalized Print with HP Technologyhttp://www.knewton.com/blog/adaptive-learning/introducing-personalized-print-with-hp-technology/
http://www.knewton.com/blog/adaptive-learning/introducing-personalized-print-with-hp-technology/#commentsThu, 02 Apr 2015 14:05:20 +0000http://www.knewton.com/?p=66310Read more]]>The digital divide is still very real in the U.S. and around the world. Some schools are 1:1, others are lucky if they have a computer in every classroom. Students’ access to technology at home also varies widely.

Knewton’s mission is to bring personalized learning materials to all students wherever they are. But until now, it’s been impossible for students who lack consistent access to computers at school or home to benefit from adaptive learning.

It’s for this reason that we’re so excited about our new collaboration with HP. Together, we’re developing Personalized Print Learning Solutions to make Knewton-powered adaptive learning materials seamlessly available across print and digital platforms. Publishers and teachers can make print materials like textbooks and worksheets personalized for each student.

How It Works

Leveraging Knewton’s existing adaptive learning platform, publishers can use Personalized Print Learning Solutions to make digital and/or print content adaptive. Teachers can assign uniquely tailored lessons for students with only a smartphone and a printer. Imagine a teacher with a few dozen students, some of whom have computers at home and some of whom don’t. With Personalized Print, the teacher can assign a print worksheet, tagged by HP Link Creation Studio technology, that corresponds to the material she covered in class that day.

Once a student completes his work, the student or teacher can scan it with a smartphone. HP technology allows Knewton to receive the student’s responses with the simple press of a button. Just as in a Knewton-powered digital solution, Knewton adaptive learning technology analyzes the student’s answers, plus his past work, and calculates his proficiencies across all related learning concepts. Then, Knewton recommends what content the student should work on next, and suggests a new individualized content packet or textbook chapter for that student to complete for his next assignment.

Knewton’s collaboration with HP technology and their 5,000-strong global network of local print shops will enable publishers to create and deliver personalized chapters. The new “mini-textbook” can be delivered each week or as frequently as the school would like. Teachers can also print these personalized packets locally in the classroom. Students with computers can work on them online. Students who are struggling received targeted help to catch up with the rest of the class, while those who are ahead stay engaged with more challenging material.

Personalized Print opens up a whole new world of possibilities for publishers, teachers, and students. Publishers can offer personalized, made-to-order materials that are more effective and more economical than a standard one-size-fits-all textbook. Schools with tight budgets can provide the power of Knewton-powered adaptive learning to their students. Teachers can better support the diverse needs of every student in their classes. And students in all schools can access the exact learning materials they need to succeed, exactly when they need them.

For more on Personalized Print Learning Solutions, read the press release.